Archives for December 2015

Did you ever wonder why podcasts often publish a preview before they get started? Well, because iTunes.

iTunes is the 800-pound gorilla in the podcast world, so you really want to make sure your podcast name is available in iTunes before you go to too much trouble actually making your podcast. However, you can search on your desired name in iTunes and see if anyone else is already using it. If not great, but what if someone else takes the name before you get ready to start releasing episodes?

To reserve your name, you have to submit your podcast to iTunes. Which requires a RSS feed with at least one episode in it. So you need to make an episode before anyone else takes your name.

Planning a podcast is surprisingly involved and time-consuming, and it can take a long time to get that feed started. And you could go through all that trouble to find that someone else took your name in iTunes.

The workaround is to publish a preview. That’s what this is. It’s not much of a preview – there’s no content from upcoming episodes. We don’t expect anyone to actually listen to it. But now we can make an RSS feed and submit it to iTunes so no one else can make a “Whisper Condition” podcast, and so you can subscribe and find out first when we publish an actual episode.